Reddit Reddit reviews At Day's Close: Night in Times Past

We found 12 Reddit comments about At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

History
Books
Historical Study
At Day's Close: Night in Times Past
W W Norton Company
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12 Reddit comments about At Day's Close: Night in Times Past:

u/whatthefat · 9 pointsr/science

Sure. The source of this idea is the book At Day's Close by the historian Roger Ekirch. He went through historical documents to try to determine how people in the past slept. In doing so, he found many references to a "first sleep" and a "second sleep". People often refer to taking their first sleep shortly after sundown, then awakening for an hour or two before taking their second sleep for the rest of the night. This is now usually referred to as segmented sleep.

The idea that our 'natural' sleep patterns are segmented was picked up by the media very quickly and it has now become a well-known "fact". Unfortunately, we don't have a whole lot of experimental support for this idea. Under most free-sleep conditions, people tend to sleep in a consolidated fashion. The most important experiment in support of the segmented sleep hypothesis is actually the one I mentioned in my previous post, where people were in bed in darkness for 14 hours per night. Under those conditions, some of the participants appeared to adopt a segmented sleep pattern.

The argument is that we may have lost these sleep patterns through the use of electric light after sunset, which promotes wakefulness and delays the circadian rhythm, pushing sleep onset back much later into the night.

u/bitparity · 3 pointsr/todayilearned

Much of this is from a fantastic book about the history of night, and how we modern people have our perceptions of what night was like in pre-industrial times COMPLETELY wrong.

It's a great book, and well sourced. The guy took 20 years to put it together.

http://www.amazon.com/At-Days-Close-Night-Times/dp/0393329011/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345046946&sr=1-1&keywords=at+day%27s+close

u/Pregnantandroid · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Two phase sleep was discovered by A. Roger Ekirch. It is described in his book: At Day's Close: Night in Times Past.

u/penpractice · 2 pointsr/slatestarcodex

>It's likely that pre-industrial societies had very different sleeping schedule, and wakefulness in the middle of the night was widespread,

Yes, I read an interesting book on this a while back. There are even studies showing that when you take out artificial light, most participants go back to waking up in the middle of the night for 30 min to 45 min. Participants also had a surge of prolactin, which is probably why throughout history, this period between "two sleeps" was usually reserved for prayer and sex.

>Young children and adults, especially older adults, tend to wake up earlier than teenagers and young adults

"Tend to wake up earlier" is a gross conflation with "a significant number of people were night owls". That's a big straw owl of my argument. I have no doubt that old people wake up earlier and younger people later, the question is whether they are naturally predisposed to activity in the evening and for a substantially different "chronotype". Have we studied this in societies that do not have rampant circadian abuse? Do we find night owls in the Amish community, or in primitive tribes? There's no use studying the prevalence of night owls in developed nations with artificial lighting because the research will never be able to prove the hypothesis that night owls are a biologically-determined category. I mean, theoretically you could, but you'd need a big sample size, and you'd need to track for months, and you'd need a person to change his entire lifestyle including when he talks to his friends using technology.

>for morning people, cortical excitability

Yes, it was actually reading about cortisol this morning that made me doubt the fundamentality of chronotype. For most intents and purposes, cortisol = stimulation and acute stressors. If you surf the web, game, and talk to friends in the evening, you are going to find a huge cortisol spike at night; and because of such a spike, the cortisol awakening response (CAR) is going to be diminished, hence you feel more fatigued in the morning. Your main cortisol release is going to be conditioned to when you mainly stimulate yourself. Talking to friends on Discord in between texting your girlfriend, gaming, doing homework, and engaging in adult behavior is absolutely going to make the evening your main cortisol spike. The body cannot maintain high cortisol forever, it will inevitably need times of low cortisol (even if you have chronically high cortisol), and if the evening is when you're having high cortisol then the morning and early afternoon is when you're having relatively low cortisol.

Note also how reliant cortisol is on blood sugar, and as such type of meal. Fasting will keep cortisol high; carbohydrates will radically lower cortisol for up to 2.5 hours. So you also need to look and see what people are eating, in additional to the myriad number of habits that they've procured over the course of their life.

>it's common knowledge in sleep research that chronotype is a real thing

Yes, I don't doubt that it's common knowledge. I am alleging that the common knowledge is actually totally wrong. I'd love to read more.

u/searedscallops · 2 pointsr/AskWomen

Like, does it exist? Sure. Is there historical evidence? It appears so: At Day's Close: Night in Times Past https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393329011/ (I haven't read this book yet, but it seems to have been well reviewed.)

u/IQBoosterShot · 1 pointr/Toastmasters

"Night Light" was my speech and it was a comparison between how ancient man and modern man utilize light.

I opened with this:
> It is night outside but as modern people we barely take notice. Have you ever lost power at night? If so, you were probably surprised at how dark it became. One hundred years after the creation of electric lights we are so accustomed to illumination that we are taken aback by its absence.

> Our experiences after dark differs greatly from that of our ancestors. They stood gape-jawed beneath a cosmic spectacle while the night turned familiar paths into lost passages. We take no note of the sky and the arrival of night barely impedes our travels. While our ancestors cautiously ventured out at night, we routinely travel many miles without care or worry.

> Our “night light” has changed our relationship to the night sky and how we travel after dark.

I decided on the topic because of my interest in the book "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" by A. Roger Ekirch.

u/petit_mal · 1 pointr/todayilearned

is the history prof you're talking about A. Roger Ekirch? he also wrote a book: At Day's Close: Night in Times Past

u/Ibrey · 1 pointr/TraditionalCatholics

The way we sleep, hard as it may be to believe, is just a social convention. In pre-industrial times, it was entirely normal and natural for people to get up for a few hours in the middle of the night, and not just holy ascetics getting up to say Matins. People took this time to pray, smoke, use their marital rights, or even visit their neighbours. Roger Ekirch has written about this in his book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past with extensive documentation.

u/Crimsonflwr · 1 pointr/polyphasic

Hey, I'm unsure if you got my reply on the Discord so I'm reposting it here:


"It's not really that rare to see naturally segmented sleepers. It's also not THE natural pattern, but instead one of two natural patterns. People who slept closer to the equator slept in a Siesta-patern, and people who slept closer to the poles slept in a Segmented-pattern. Artificial light plays a huge role here. It's because of it that people started sleeping in a monophasic pattern. Fire doesn't affect peoples melatonin levels, so I'm refering to the industrial revolution.


Not everyone has a 25h circadian rhythm, but even you would have such a rhythm it still does not force you to to sleep monophasically.


There are over 500 historical reports of people waking up in the middle of the night, or people describing their "second sleep" (apparently in this book https://www.amazon.com/At-Days-Close-Night-Times/dp/0393329011, supported by this study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4763365/). Our circadian rhythm also has the SWS and REM peaks so far away from each other that regular monophasic sleep does not cover both. We also have a drop in energy during the day. Why would this be the case if we were meant to sleeo monophasically? There are also tribes who sleep in a Segmented-pattern today (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajhb.22979).


So our historical documents support us being biphasic, same thing with the structure of our circadian rhythms and the fact that there are modern tribes sleep biphasically."


In addition to this I would like to add that there are indeed some tribes that sleep monophasically. There is also the Piranha tribe that sleeps in several chunks each day, and there are tribes that sleep biphasically. Due to the circadian rhythm being structures the way it is I at least believe that we are meant to be sleeping either biphasically or triphasically. There's also this cool study done (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327919664_SLEEP_PATTERNS_OF_MEDICAL_STUDENTS_THEIR_RELATIONSHIP_WITH_ACADEMIC_PERFORMANCE_A_CROSS_SECTIONAL_SURVEY), which shows that biphasic sleepers had the best academic performance!